Citation Challenged

It just occurred to me that I’m going to have to learn how to put references in my thesis. I don’t have EndNote, but I have free institutional access to RefWorks and all my papers are already in there, so I thought I’d try how it works.I should mention that I have used EndNote only once or twice in my entire life. I hate it, I barely understand how to use it, and I find it much less work to manually enter each citation by hand.

I should mention that I have used EndNote only once or twice in my entire life. I hate it, I barely understand how to use it, and I find it much less work to manually enter references.My one

My one first-author paper was made using EndNote, but my supervisor did that from her EndNote library. My reclassification exam was done by hand, and since then I haven’t had to reference more than 10 papers in anything.

But I have over 300 papers catalogued in RefWorks, and it does come with “WriteNCite”, a program to put the references in your document, so I should maybe learn how to use that before I start the bulk of the writing.

I just practised using WriteNCite by creating a word file describing what I was doing and referencing papers along the way.

I figured it out, but here are some quotes from the notes I took while trying it out:
“Now I’m going to add another citation. Maybe this one{{651 Lee,S. 2006; }}.
And try to rebuild the bibliography:
Click again on bibliography…
…program crashed!
Awesome. Yeah, this is really going to work well for hundreds of references…”

“Oh, wait. I just noticed that there is a new word document called Final-
WriteNCite_test.doc which I have been typing in, and I should have edited the original
WriteNCite_test.doc
Let’s try that….”

“Ha! This completely screwed up the “Final” document I already had. It removed a
reference, there is text in the references, the original code for the third ref is still in there
but that part of the text is also added at the end…”

“Let me close the “Final” document and try the bibliography again.
Aha! Now it works…
So it builds the references correctly UNLESS there is another Final document open, and
you should be really careful not to edit the final version but only the one in which you’re
citing. They look very similar, and this is going to go so very wrong…”
This is going to be fun!

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